Andrew Sage

Yeah.

And apparently they got like a kind of favorable sort of OK-ish kind of trade deal out of giving the president of the United States giant golden crown.

So in terms of tariff news, while in China, Trump had his long awaited meeting with Xi Jinping.

They struck a deal.

Trump decreased the quote-unquote fentanyl tariffs to 10%, which leaves the tariff rate for all Chinese goods at 47%, down from its previous 57%.

China has agreed to not do rare earth mineral restrictions that we talked about last week and has also pledged to buy U.S.

soybeans.

Again, it's deeply unclear how much of this is actually going to happen.

I think...

My guess is that they probably won't do the harshest of the rare mineral restrictions, but I will believe the soybean purchases when I see it and I haven't seen it yet.

There's also been some interesting news out of the Senate where there's been a couple of symbolic votes against some sets of tariffs.

The Senate voted 50 to 46 to end the state of emergency that supposedly allows Trump to do the Canada tariffs and also voted to block tariffs against Brazil.

The four people who voted against both of these, who voted with the Democrats, are Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murawski, which it kind of makes sense because Collins and Murawski are supposedly the two moderates.

Rand Paul just hates tariffs.

He's a free trade hardliner who...

whenever I talk about this I will say he has had as much as all of this is his fault he has had one great light ever which is I have a trade deficit with my grocery store actually really good is he like an Austrian like economist like libertarian type like I know he's like a libertarian guy I'm just

Trying to figure out what specific flavor he is.

Yeah, he's, like, one of the Austrian, like, gold standards.

But also, like, those people are still free trade people.

Like, really hard line.